Luke: * Is race such a big deal in America that we can't talk about it
publicly?

Steve: Well, we talk about race all the time, but in private. You're
also allowed to joke about race in public if you are a comedian. You're
just not supposed to write seriously and honestly about it in public.

For example, take the connection between race, crime, and real estate.
Try this experiment: Go tell your most politically correct friends that
you've found the perfect house to buy. It has a very cheap price and it's
in a conveniently located neighborhood … right on Martin Luther King Blvd.
(The nice thing about this experiment is that it hardly matters what city
you live in.). Your friends will make very clear to you that you would
be a fool to move to Martin
Luther King Blvd.

Stand-up comics are socially allowed to talk about race in public. For
example, Chris Rock famously advised: "If a friend calls you on the telephone
and says they're lost on Martin Luther King Boulevard and they want to
know what they should do, the best response is 'Run!'"

But, you aren't supposed to write seriously about race in public, other
than to repeat the usual cant. For example, a fine reporter named Jonathan
Tilove wrote a book in 2003 called "Along
Martin Luther King: Travels on Black America's Main Street," but practically
nobody besides me would review it, apparently because of discomfort over
the "stereotypes" associated with MLK Blvds.

Of course, serious public debate in print or on-line is far better than
private talk to figure out how to ameliorate our country's problems. So,
public understanding of race remains crude because writing frankly about
race just isn't done in polite society.

Much of the censorship stems from the following logic (if you can call
it logic): "If different racial groups tend to behave somewhat differently,
then -- oh my God -- Hitler Was Right! Therefore, we must never allow
this fact to be mentioned in print, or the public will learn the horrible
truth and they'll all vote Nazi."

Well, that's just nuts on so many levels.

It's one big non-sequiter: Of course, there are different racial
groups. And of course their members tend to inherit certain different
genes, on average, than the members of other racial groups. And that means
racial groups will differ, on average, in various innate capabilities.
But that also means that no group can be supreme at all jobs. To be excellent
at one skill frequently implies being worse at something else. So, there
can't be a Master Race.

Sports fans can cite countless examples. Men of West African descent
monopolize the Olympic 100m
dash, but their explosive musculature, which is so helpful in sprinting,
weighs them down in distance running, where they are also-rans. Similarly,
there are far more Samoans in the National Football League than Chinese,
simply because Samoans tend to be much, much bigger. But precisely because
Samoans are so
huge, they'll never do as well as the Chinese in gymnastics, on average.

* What have been the repercussions to your life from your writings on
race?

I guess it's made me a cult figure, which is bizarre because I'm just
about the most boringly conventional guy I know: a middle-aged, golf-playing,
Republican family man with an MBA.

Years ago when I was working on a deal alongside a wise investment banker
of the old school, he told me, "Always tell the truth. It's much easier
to remember." At my age now, my memory isn't getting any better. Besides,
I figure that the truth is better for the human race than lies, ignorance,
and wishful thinking. At minimum, it's more interesting.

* Can a society ever have too much diversity?

Personally, I like ethnic diversity a lot. I lived for many years in
the Uptown neighborhood in Chicago, where something like 100 different
languages are spoken. I enjoy observing different kinds of people, and
because I'm rather shy, the fact that I couldn't converse with most of
my neighbors due to the language barriers wasn't much of a problem to
me. And I didn't worry too much about crime because I'm a big galoot and
muggers don't mess with me much.

But, just because I like diversity doesn't mean everyone else necessarily
should. When you get right down to it, most intellectuals' prescriptions
for how to improve the world is for the human race to Be Like Me. Well,
I try not to be that dogmatic about imposing my tastes on others. For
example, among all the professional film critics in this country, I probably
spend the least time in my reviews
explaining my opinion of the movie and the most time analyzing the issues
it raises. I like understanding how the world works more than I like.

For example, precisely what I liked about Uptown was what made it a lousy
place to raise a family due to it lack of neighborliness, crime, and public
schools completely overwhelmed by the challenge of educating children
speaking 100 different languages.

Ethnic diversity isn't of much interest or value to little kids. They
need to learn to deal first with all the human diversity that is found
in even the most mono-ethnic communities: young and old, boy and girl,
and all the different personality types that you see even in one extended
family. Further, kids need some homogeneity and safety so they can learn
independence. Before the great crime wave began in the 1960s, kids used
to walk or ride their bikes everywhere. Now, moms chauffeur their kids
everywhere, which is bad for kids and bad for women.

Overall, like everything else in life, increased ethnic diversity comes
with tradeoffs. The funny thing is that a lot of its side effects are
precisely the ones that liberals say they oppose: for instance, diversity
makes free speech less popular; it lessens community solidarity and support
for welfare programs, and it vulgarizes the arts.
That probably why so many liberals have moved to Howard Dean's and Bernie
Sanders' Vermont, which is the whitest state in the country.

* What do you think about the flood of illegal immigrants into the US?
Is that good for our country?

It's good for some people, bad for others. The problem is that most of
the Americans it's good are already among the most privileged people in
America -- factory owners looking for cheap,
nonunionized labor; corporate farmers wanting to bust the UFW
with scabs from south of the border; movie stars looking for cheap
servants; Democratic politicians, ethnic activists, people who eat
out at sit-down
restaurants a lot (such as journalists), and so forth. In contrast,
illegal immigration tends to be bad for the poor and working class of
America -- it cuts their wages, messes
up their public schools, increases the cost of health care because
so few illegals have insurance that the cost of their care gets passed
on by hospitals to the rest of us, and increases crime in their neighborhoods.

But while the victims of illegal immigration outnumber the beneficiaries,
they don't have much influence compared to the privileged. If you look
at poll results, the divergence between elite opinion and mass opinion
is greatest on immigration. The privileged maintain their privileges by
demonizing anyone who calls for the enforcement of the laws against illegal
immigration as a "racist," "xenophobe," "nativist," etc.

* Is it good to be proud of being black? Is it bad to be proud of being
white?

I don't have too much of a problem with either, but I think it's healthier
for our country to inculcate non-racial loyalties, such as being proud
of being an American citizen, which is a legal concept, not a racial one.
I'm a "citizenist." I try to think about: "What is in the best overall
interests of the current citizens of the United States?" In contrast,
so many others think in terms of: "What is in the best interest of my:
identity group / race / ethnicity / religion / bank account / class /
ideology / clique / gender / sexual orientation / party / and/or personal
feelings of moral superiority?" Precisely because basing loyalties upon
a legal category defined by our elected representatives -- citizenship
-- is so unnatural, it's the least destructive and most uplifting form
of allegiance humanly possible on an effective scale. I believe in
looking out for my fellow citizens, especially the ones who didn't get
lucky in the genetic lottery for IQ, even if it means I have to pay a
little more to have my strawberries picked. And that's one reason why
I'm against illegal immigration -- the elites have trashed the concept
of solidarity with our fellow American citizens in order import more cheap
labor.

* Is race a concept that has a basis in reality? In genetics?

First, the human race is clearly one single, interbreeding species.

Second, there's a huge amount of confusion on this subject since the
standard scientific model of race we've had since Linnaeus -- race as
subspecies -- doesn't work very well in theory, although it turns out
to be surprisingly close to adequate in practice, as the findings of population
geneticists L.L. Cavali-Sforza
and Neil
Risch show. Risch, who is with the UC San Francisco Medical School,
compared the racial self-identification of medical patients to what their
genes said their background was and found over 99% agreement.

Third, the logical problems with the Linnaean taxonomic model of race,
however, allow many people to advance the trendy Race Does Not Exist dogma
by throwing difficult questions at supporters of the race as subspecies
model, such as "So, how many races are there?" "What race is Tiger Woods?"
"How can you belong to more than one race?" and "Can races change over
time?"

But this conceptual fuzziness inherent in race is common in the natural
world. The best example of the fuzziness of natural categories is the
"extended family." All the criticisms made about the fuzziness of racial
groups apply in spades to extended families. How many extended families
do you belong to? Well, at least two: your mom's and your dad's. But they
each belonged to their parents' two extended families, so maybe you belong
to four. And your grandparents each belonged to two …

And what are the boundaries of your various extended families? If the
question at hand is who you'd give a spare kidney to, you'd probably draw
the limits rather narrowly. But, when making up your Christmas card list,
you probably toss in the occasional third cousin, twice removed. And exactly
what's the appropriate name for all these extended families anyway?

In fact, extended families are even less clear-cut than racial groups.
Yet, nobody goes around smugly claiming that extended families don't exist.
I dislike the Linnaean model, with its implicit assumption of "A race
for everyone and everyone in his race." All the Linnaean categories both
below and above "species," such as "subspecies" or "genus," tend to be
highly arbitrary. So I've been exploring an older definition of race,
which has the advantages of both being almost undeniable to the point
of tautology, and fitting closer with what people around the globe think
of as race: lineage. By far the most useful definition of a racial group
is "a partly inbred
extended family."

Why is extended family such a perfect analogy for race? Because it's
not an analogy. They are the same thing: kin, individuals united by common
descent. There's no natural law defining where extended families end.
A racial group is merely an extended family (often an extremely extended
family) that inbreeds to some extent. It's this tendency to marry within
the group that makes racial groups somewhat more coherent, cohesive, and
longer lasting than smaller-scale extended families.

For example, oceans slow down intermarriage. The same is true for the
Sahara and the Himalayas. Social barriers of language, religion, caste,
class, etc. get in the way of the whole world turning into beige Tiger
Woods-look-alikes.

* What do you think of the famous chapter on race and IQ in the book
The
Bell Curve?

Something that always kills me is how liberals denounce IQ as utterly
meaningless, except when they claim IQ scores prove that they are smarter
than conservatives. Right after the election, millions upon millions of
liberals visited web
pages reassuring them that the blue states had much higher average
IQs the than red states (such as Connecticut 113 and Utah 87). But, as
I pointed out, it was a complete hoax,
an utter fabrication.

As for The
Bell Curve, even though it is one of the biggest selling social science
books since Kinsey, it is now out of print, which says a lot about the
intellectual climate these days. As for the backlash against the book,
well, as my friend Greg Cochran says, "Nobody ever gets that mad at somebody
unless they are telling the truth."

In many ways, though, what interests me more in The Bell Curve is its
analysis of trends that transcend race, such as the stratification of
American society by IQ, a process that allows the clever to wage a clandestine
class war against the clueless. Nobody on the higher IQ right half of
the bell curve is very interested in the welfare of the left half of the
bell curve, per se. I wrote a long series on how to help our fellow citizens
on the left
half of the Bell Curve, but I've never seen anybody else interested
in the subject.

* Can a racial or ethnic or religious group only have good characteristics?
Is ascribing only good to a group patronizing?

These days we're supposed to celebrate diversity - but not notice it!
The reality is that life is about trade-offs. For example, in the last
six Olympics, all 48 finalists in the men's 100-meter dash to determine
the World's Fastest Man have been of West African descent. On the other
hand, the kind of massive muscularity and minimal body fat percentage
that allows people of West African descent to dominate sprinting makes
them very bad at, say, English Channel swimming. Sprint champions tend
to sink like stones.

Nobody can be best at everything. There's no such thing as racial supremacy.
Nobody can be above average at everything either. We don't live in Lake
Wobegon.

Chaim Amalek writes: "The interview you did with Steve Sailor is
one of the best discussions of race I've ever seen on the internet. They
could build a course around it at Stern College. Kudos to you for asking,
and to him for answering."

In practicing medicine, I am not colorblind. I always take note of
my patient's race. So do many of my colleagues. We do it because certain
diseases and treatment responses cluster by ethnicity. Recognizing these
patterns can help us diagnose disease more efficiently and prescribe
medications more effectively. When it comes to practicing medicine,
stereotyping often works.

But to a growing number of critics, this statement is viewed as a shocking
admission of prejudice. After all, shouldn't all patients be treated
equally, regardless of the color of their skin? The controversy came
to a boil last May in The New England Journal of Medicine. The journal
published a study revealing that enalapril, a standard treatment for
chronic heart failure, was less helpful to blacks than to whites. Researchers
found that significantly more black patients treated with enalapril
ended up hospitalized. A companion study examined carvedilol, a beta
blocker; the results indicated that the drug was equally beneficial
to both races. These clinically important studies were accompanied,
however, by an essay titled "Racial Profiling in Medical Research."
Robert S. Schwartz, a deputy editor at the journal, wrote that prescribing
medication by taking race into account was a form of "race-based medicine"
that was both morally and scientifically wrong. "Race is not only imprecise
but also of no proven value in treating an individual patient," Schwartz
wrote. "Tax-supported trolling . . . to find racial distinctions in
human biology must end."